Village of the Damned (1995)

(yes, apparently they did this intentionally. I don't know who thought that looked acceptable.)

Village of the Damned (1995)

Dir. John Carpenter

Written by David Himmelstein, based on the screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch, based on the novel by John Wyndham

Starring Christopher Reeve, Thomas Dekker, Lindsey Haun, Kirstie Alley, Linda Kozlowski, Michael Paré, and Meredith Salenger, but who gives a shit about any of them, because it also features Mark fucking Hamill as “Reverend George.” That’s right, you got a John Carpenter movie with God Damn Luke Skywalker in it. And you haven’t even seen it, you lazy, worthless ingrate. I bet you’ve seen at least one of those idiot JJ Abrams STAR TREK movies and yet you’ve never even considered watching this mid-career offering from one of the genre’s acknowledged masters, even though it stars fucking Mark Hamill. You’re everything that’s wrong with the world, and it’s time you admitted that.

            Another day, another entry into our ever-growing How Could It Not Be Great? canon. Holy shit, you think, John Carpenter, just a year after the underrated IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS, adapting a novel by the great mid-century sci-fi author John Wyndham (which had already been adapted into something of a minor classic in 1960), with a decent budget and a solid cast, how could this not be… Oh, who am I kidding? You know exactly how this could not be great. Let’s face it, remaking the 1960 British sci-fi/horror staple VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED in 1995 was a bad idea from the get-go. The original was deeply and inseparably a product of its time, drawing its charm from a fragile mix of Cold War anxiety, mild 60’s British transgressiveness, and stagey (and in retrospect, more than a little campy) but earnest black-and-white dreamy matinee creeps.

I am a writer by avocation, but as a writer about film, I concede to the medium the broad axiom that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” So consider these three shots to be the 3,000 or so words it would take me to properly articulate what the 1960 VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is all about:

I mean, those three shots tell you everything you need to know about it, good and bad. On one hand, there’s no getting around the fact that the little blond kids with glowing eyes and slack faces are corny as hell. They’re meant to look alien and uncanny, of course, but the effect is just so artificial and oversold that it’s hard to take it seriously. On the other hand, the black and white film combined with the pervading stagey and artificial quality of 50’s British genre cinema (which this resembles much more than the Hammer-influenced gothic horror explosion of the 60s) also allows the film to neatly sidestep realism and offer the viewer at least the option of meeting the film’s signature iconography on its own terms. Most genre fiction, after all, requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and in their own native milieu, I think even the glowing-eye towheads of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED are a functional object, of sorts.

But let me ask you this, what if we did the same thing in 1995 in glorious COLOR? 

                        So yeah, this was never going to be a good idea, and, it should be noted, even Carpenter himself wasn’t too enthused about the project. As he succinctly put it in a 2011 interview, “I’m really not passionate about Village of the Damned. I was getting rid of a contractual assignment.” Which is fair enough, I guess. I mean, a job’s a job, and those Lakers tickets don’t pay for themselves.

            The end result of that contractual assignment is a film which is hardly in danger of being mistaken for a passion project. It’s entirely competent -- nothing here suggests the bizarrely misjudged boondoggle of GHOSTS OF MARS, only six years and two films away -- but it categorically resists rising to any kind of high point that would give us a clue as to what someone thought the point was supposed to be. In fact, the plot hews so closely to the original film that the script by David Himmelstein (a baffling, sparse resume of four writing credits between 1986-1996, ranging from the Edward James Olmos sports flick TALENT FOR THE GAMES to Sidney Lumet’s POWER) is credited as an adaptation of the 1960 screenplay, rather than an adaptation of the 1957 Wyndham novel. It adds a few little details here and there (including a few touches of gore that seem wildly out of place), but never enough to give any indication why someone thought this was worth remaking. The eye effects, I guess? 30 years of special effects progress has finally made it possible to tell this story the way it was meant to be told… with the same light up eyes now in COLOR. Yes, you heard that right. COLOR.

Anyway, the plot is basically identical to the 1960 version: one day, out of the blue, every living creature in and around the small California town of Midwich suddenly falls asleep, wherever they are. Anyone entering the area immediately suffers the same fate. In six hours, they all awaken, except the ones who were driving, or tightrope walking, or juggling chainsaws or whatever. Or, in one agreeably gruesome case, standing over a grill. But mostly the citizens just wake up and go back to their lives, a little unsure what happened. Unsure, that is, until a few months later, when local doctor Chaffee (Christopher Reeve, in his final role before an accident left him paralyzed) starts to realize that ten of the town’s women (including virginal Melanie Roberts, [Meredith Salenger, LAKE PLACID]) seem to have been impregnated during the “blackout.” And when the kids are born, it quickly becomes clear that they are some kind of psychic, super-intelligent hivemind with matching Debbie Harry Sisqo Eminem Machine Gun Kelly hair and lite-brite eyes. And also that they’re evil.

This last detail is made clear surprisingly early on, probably the most significant alteration the 1995 script makes. The 1960 version plays out slowly, spending much of its runtime examining the townsfolks’ strained, confused reaction to this inexplicable phenomenon and never showing the children doing anything unambiguously hostile until over 50 minutes into a 77 minute runtime. Here, there’s no doubt; right from the cradle, these kids are causing mayhem, and pretty much everyone knows it. On one hand, that was probably the only way to approach this material in 1995; how tedious would it have been to drag it out and try to pretend the audience doesn’t already know that the creepy little kids with the glowing eyes are the bad guys? But on the other hand, the entire conflict of the original film is based on the adults’ wrestling with their uncertainty about what the kids are, what they want, and what to do with them. Here, all those questions are answered almost immediately, but the movie doesn’t really pose any alternate conflict to replace the one it kills off. The two movies proceed almost identically --even featuring nearly parallel scenes-- except that, having resolved the central conflict which the 1960 version uses to fuel nearly its entire plot within the first 20 minutes, the 1995 version finds it has nowhere to go, and just kind of sits there spinning its wheels, reinforcing the point over and over that yep, these kids sure are evil, all right. None of it is bad per se, but it sure is narratively inert, and it really makes you feel that runtime. Anything under two hours is hardly a difficult ask in this age where people routinely watch through entire seasons of TV in a single night, but it’s worth noting that the 1960 version leisurely works through its storyline in a slim 77 minutes, while Carpenter’s version has arguably less plot to work through, and still runs a full 22 minutes longer.

Part of that longer running time --a small part, but a notable one-- is devoted to a smattering of stepiece kill scenes, which was surely part of the marketing calculous of bringing Carpenter into the remake. The original has a relatively low body count --I recall only three victims-- but was certainly not above taking a sadistic pleasure in milking them for morbid thrills. The remake keeps all three deaths intact, and adds a few more of its own, including a nasty self-vivisection and a surprisingly huge gun battle (in the original, the townsfolk consider calling in the military, but dismiss the idea upon realizing the kids would just use their mind control to make the soldiers shoot each other. The remake, of course, is understandably curious as to what that would look like). As with revealing the kid’s malicious intentions early, this makes sense on the surface, and might in itself have been enough to justify a remake, if they had really committed to that approach. A pivot from Twilight Zone eeriness to giddy splatter would be weird, but would certainly embody a fresh approach to the material, made possible only in the intervening 35 years. 

Alas, then, that 1995’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED doesn’t really do that. There’s certainly more explicit gore than the original, but not nearly enough to give the film a reason for being, or clearly locate it in a particular mode of horror. It’s appreciated, but it’s not enough to justify the clash in tones which inevitably results when you throw five or six gimmicky death scenes into a screenplay essentially written in 1960. These are two distinct flavors of horror which do not mesh together comfortably at all. Haphazardly stitching one into the other blurs the film’s focus and heightens the sense of filmmakers trying to hedge their bets by throwing different things at the audience to see what sticks, instead of committing to one clear vision.

That same scatterbrained sense of good ideas indifferently applied carries over into the film’s themes, too. In the “Production Notes” on the DVD, Reeve reflects, “When they made [the original] in 1960, the evil alien, if you will, was Communism. This was the threat, the disease that could overtake this healthy American organism of liberty and democracy. With the demise of the Cold War, we don’t have that threat any more. But we have something else -- the indifference to violence. And the message in this film is the banality of violence, of evil. Death has no consequence, and metaphorically, we see that here as a kind of infection, which certainly exists in our culture today.”

Maybe so, which helps to elucidate the decision to portray the kids as blatantly evil right from the start, and to have pretty much everyone aware of that fact. It’s definitely no longer a metaphor for a subversion or invasion. But I’m less convinced the story lends itself well to the idea that it’s about indifference to violence. I mean, it is about that, I guess, in the sense that the parents spend so much time begging the kids to feel human emotion and empathy (a point touched upon in the original, but which is insisted upon here). But it’s not much of a metaphor since the aliens were just zapped onto Earth, and there’s no evidence they could be convinced to do anything other than murder us all, and our only hope is to kill them before they use their telepathic powers to have us all commit suicide. So what exactly is the message here? “Don’t be a ultra-powerful psychic sociopath?” OK. I’m not convinced it’s exactly an immaculate metaphor for creeping Communist menace either, but at least in 1960s England that threat was understood to come from outside, as an invading force. Carpenter certainly knows that indifference to violence isn’t some alien feeling being forced on humanity, it’s an impulse that comes from within us, as old as civilization, and so representing it with these invading others who are completely alien and incomprehensible to us just doesn’t really work. Consequently, the movie offers but doesn’t really commit to this reading, allowing it, like the setpiece kill scenes, to melt inconsequentially into its aimless wandering without providing any sense of direction.

Similarly, Carpenter himself offers a gendered reading of the remake: “The original movie and the novel were written from a masculine point of view. This was an opportunity to explore the female aspect of the story and their reaction to the situation.” I’ll grant the "female aspect of the story" could use some exploring; the 60’s version is so profoundly disinterested in what the women think that it actually has its protagonist patronizingly send his wife on vacation while he makes plans to (SPOILER) suicide bomb their kid. And for a movie which condemns the little monsters for lack of empathy, its curiosity about the human emotions evoked by this situation barely extends beyond its mild irritation that emotional women make it hard to think rationally about the problem. Even original director Wolf Rilla (CAIRO, and what a name!) agreed that, “We made [our] film at a period when the old male chauvinism was still very strong. John [Carpenter] has brought another element into [his film], one of feminism, which is quite right. One discusses these sorts of things more openly than we did in the 50’s and 60’s, when people would be uptight about sex and anything to do with it.”

Seems like a good idea, and there are definitely a bunch of women in the cast, but since none of these characters are very interesting, and we learn very, very little about what they’re thinking beyond the most basic platitudes, I don’t know that it really adds much. Certainly calling it feminist in any sense seems hard to defend. Maybe it would have been more shocking back in 1995 that the kids have a female leader (Lindsey Haun, SHROOMS, far and away the most committed and effective performance in the film), and there’s a cynical female doctor (Kirstie Alley, STAR TREK 2: THE WRATH OF KHAN and Operating Thetan Level 7)? A quick survey of contemporary reviews doesn’t give that impression, but what the hell, good thought, anyway.

 Carpenter is also said in the DVD extras to have added some theological rumination, but man, it’s just barely in there. I mean, they say bible verses, I guess. But it’s a long way from exploring the subject in any kind of meaningful way. After all, holy shit!, aliens and telepathy and mind control! The very existence of these things has enormous ramifications for our ideas about the soul, about morality, about death, about humanity’s place in the universe. But all the movie offers is a grim-looking Mark Hamill (JOHN CARPENTER’S BODY BAGS) reading a prayer about children. Just another example of how the movie is not lacking for content, but isn’t really ABOUT anything. It gives the impression of a film where some thought was put into what to do, but little effort was put into actually doing it.

Carpenter, even in the same interview he admits to not caring much about the movie, does claim that, “it has a very good performance from Christopher Reeve, so there’s some value in it.” It’d be kind of petty to quibble with something like that, especially given what happened to poor Reeve afterwords, but although there’s nothing wrong with his acting, I can’t help but notice that he, like nearly everyone in the film, is bizarrely miscast. It’s not his fault, really, it’s just that he is simply not believable as a real human. Come on, nobody is that ruggedly handsome, he looks like a cartoon prince who shows up at the end of a Disney movie. The stupid kids in the Sisqo wigs look more convincing. And they are, after all, kids -- pitting them against a literal superman is a damn strange dynamic, and having everyone else in the movie try to pretend he’s just some podunk country doctor and not some kind of adonis übermensch is even weirder.

            The rest of the cast is mostly a wash. Alley is also a truly befuddling choice for a cynical, vaguely sinister government agent, but it hardly matters because the role (which has only a tenuous parallel with the 1960 version) is vaguely written in the extreme, with the film unsure how to posit a character who confusingly vacillates between callused villain and minor second protagonist. And other than the A+ work from young Lindsey Haun as the childrens’ leader and spokesman, nobody else in the cast gets much to do. Linda Kozlowski and Meredith Salenger are both admirably committed to the single character trait they’re assigned, but can’t do much more. Michael Paré vanishes before he can leave an impression.

And then you’ve also got Mark Hamill in there. He’s really trying hard, but unfortunately it’s not much of a role, and it wouldn’t even really be worth mentioning at all except that remember, he’s Mark Fucking Hamill, so the fact that he’s standing around in the background of various scenes making us wish he was talking is kind of distracting. He plays the town priest, “Reverend George,” in a role which must surely have been meant for an older character actor. In fact, in this 2015 interview he claims he was brought into the production late, after David Warner, who originally had the part, dropped out. Warner would have been ideal for this kind of thing (although you’d still be left with a character who isn’t really given much to do), but Hamill, in 1995, was still too young and pretty to intuitively read as a fire-and-brimstone small-town country priest, and doesn’t have enough screen time to convince us with his acting. So it’s just weird.

The strange, self-defeating casting choices are, in a way, a perfect microcosm of the movie as a whole. They’re certainly interesting, and even give the impression that someone, somewhere, was trying to do something, but aren’t nearly effectively managed enough that you come away with a clear sense of what that something might be. Even Carpenter’s score (this time co-written with Kinks’ guitarist Dave Davies[!]) seems a little less focused than usual, wandering between unusually bombastic (but not especially memorable) marches and quiet minimalism without much sense of purpose.    

So in the end, I’m sorry to have to report that John Carpenter’s VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is more interesting curiosity than chilling horror classic. “I had much higher hopes. The Wolf Rilla one is still the best,” Hamill would later judge. But still, it is a John Carpenter movie (it has George “Buck” Flowers in it and everything!), which alone is enough to demand your attention, and fuck, it’s got goddamn Mark Hamill and Superman going head-to-head against a posse of murderous alien telekinetic aryan Edgar Winter cosplayer children. Even if it never quite comes together into the swift kick in the teeth that it should be, you’d have to be a real asshole not to at least give it a try.

PS: Many reviews point out that it was filmed at the same sites in Inverness and Point Reyes, CA,  which also appeared in THE FOG. They mention this as though it’s just interesting trivia, and not hard scientific evidence that Inverness and Point Reyes, CA, are some kind of filmmaking Kryptonite for John Carpenter.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

    

TAGLINE	Beware The Children. So even the tagline is hardly trying.
TITLE ACCURACY	Has a pretty 1960s flavor to it, but I guess it’s better than the novel’s title, The Midwich Cuckoos
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yes, from the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
SEQUEL?	None, although the 1960 version has a sequel called CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED from 1964.
REMAKE?	Yes
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Bad Seed, Psychic killer, Aliens
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Christopher Reeves, Mark Hamill, Kirstie Alley (I guess?)
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	John Carpenter
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Women impregnated against their will, but it seems to be through some kind of outer space energy ray or something.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	In the original, I remember the dog growls at the evil little kids, though I don’t specifically remember that happening here.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	Yes, via mind-whammy
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	COMMUNISTS ARE INFILTRATING OUR CHILDREN AND WE MUST KILL THEM!!!

            

  

Risky Flicks: Kingsman (The Secret Service)

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014)

Dir. Matthew Vaughn

Written by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn

Starring Taron Egerton, Colin Firth, Samuel L. Jackson, Mark Strong, Michael Caine

The challenge: Oh good, finally, a movie about a white guy who is unfairly ignored by the world which doesn’t appreciate his obvious greatness, and then he learns that because of his father he’s destined to be a great warrior, and kills a bunch of bad guys, and then he feels much better about himself and everyone agrees he’s awesome. Why haven’t they ever thought to do that one before?  

What’s the risk?

• I thought the two last Mark Millar adaptations I watched --WANTED and KICK-ASS-- were just overwhelmingly unpleasant, idiotic, empowerment-fantasy porn for angry, self-pitying, narcissistic gamergate types. And this is by the same director and the same writer as KICK-ASS, probably my most viscerally hated movie of the last half-decade.
• The lead character is named Eggsy. And he has a face so aggressively punchable that when Jesus said to, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” he went on to specifically add, ”...although, there is this one little broke-ass little bitch Eggsy, and it’s completely OK if you just want to start wailing on him for no reason. In fact, I’m going to go ahead and say, I would completely understand and encourage you to do so. I’m Jesus Christ and I approve this message.”
• KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE is a title which just gets more confusing with each unnecessary added word, and it adds up to a awkward mouthful which somehow still communicates no clear point. Also it ends up that they’re an international cartel and not, in fact, related to the monarchy in any way, so not “Kingsmen” by any comprehensible measure. And while they are sort of a service, I guess, which is secret, the “Secret Service” is already a thing, and they’re not that thing. It’s like if they made a film about a group of English citizens who enjoy collecting antique rifles and called it “Kingsmen: The National Rifle Association.” Technically accurate, maybe, but a bit confusing, don’t you think?
• Somebody said something about an anal rape joke?

Possible Mitigating Factors:

• Matthew Vaughn. As much as I loathed KICK-ASS with every fiber of my being, I’ve actually enjoyed everything else he’s done (X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, LAYER CAKE, and I haven’t seen it but people keep telling me STARDUST is fun) and was willing to blame Millar for the shitty source material rather than Vaughn.
• Great cast -- Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Sam Jackson, Michael Caine, and what the hell, Mark Hamill’s in there too!

The Case:

So, this one has plenty of potentially problematic factors that got the ol’ internet predictably riled up. There is a surprisingly nasty conservative streak in there (the bad guys are black, liberal environmentalists, the good guys are aristocratic white Englishmen, and they [spoiler]  kill Obama as a joke, after he is depicted as complicit in mass murder) but again, I just can’t get as mad as the rest of the internet did about that because, come on, it’s just a nasty movie in general, and its desperate desire to offend is so transparent that it’s almost cute. Almost. Like KICK-ASS, the movie is gilded with a regrettable spitefulness that labors under the mistaken impression that going too far is the same thing as being provocative. So it delights in wallowing in embarrassing stereotypes, casual ultra-violence, and played-out misogyny under the proudly waving banner that offending people is the same as telling off the man or subverting the genre. So brave. It’s unappealing, but fortunately it does this on a more desperate, juvenile level than either of Millar’s other two cinematic adaptations; it’s more of a lonely teenager doodling swastikas in his notebook so people will notice him than it is the impotent white rage of a mass shooter that underpins the guiding logic of KICK-ASS and WANTED. It wants to shock you so you’ll think it’s cool, not because it really has any opinions on anything. And ironically, that turns out to be the bigger problem here. But at least it’s a better problem to have than being an inspiring hero’s journey for the angry nerds who aspire to be violent bullies. Baby steps. Plus, again, Mark Hamill’s in it!

Basically, the setup is this: There’s a ultra-secret “service” of upper-crusty white British guys, who are under the authority of no government but have taken it upon themselves to dispatch brutal vigilante justice whenever they feel it will benefit the world as they see it. They have all sorts of James-Bondy gadgets and a lavish HQ/training facility with all sorts of colorfully outrageous trap rooms, etc. But when an agent dies trying to save Mark Hamill, one of their arguably more open-minded members (Colin Firth, APARTMENT ZERO) decides to recruit the son of a fallen colleague, who turns out to be our man Eggsy (Taron Egerton, the upcoming LEGEND with Tom Hardy). Eggsy is as unpleasant a protagonist as they come, with his “U won 2 step up m8?” wannabe attitude and self-pitying sullenness. But Firth, clearly relishing his unusual role as an action hero, more than makes up for it, playing the part with a startlingly precise ear for tone, equal parts superhero swagger and prim English deadpan comedy. Firth has to induct Eggsy into the world of the “Kingsmen” and prepare him for a series of deadly auditions against --you guessed it-- snobby fancy-pants types who have been training for this moment their whole lives (will his streetwise, loose cannon moxie help him outsmart these over-educated prissies? I’ll never tell). You’d think Firth would explain a little more about what’s going on to Eggsy before throwing him in there, but you know how things go. I mean, you literally know how things go, since I think you can probably figure out beat-for-beat what happens with these auditions without me explaining further (side note: apparently the three abilities you need to be a Kingsman are: figuring out to breath air trapped in a toilet in a flooded room, skydiving, and being able to shoot a puppy). Unfortunately all is not well in Kingsman-world, because a nefarious Samuel Jackson has an inexplicable, convoluted plan to kill of most of the population in order to save the environment. Will our intrepid hero be able to solve this problem and avenge someone, possibly his mentor but you never know, it could be anyone, by using violence? Who can say for sure.

Never judge a man til you walk a mile in his gimmicky spy gadget shoes. After that, though, judge away.

This is a pretty dumb movie, but I honestly have to give it this: it’s reasonably well-structured, paced nicely (especially given its 129 minute runtime) and sprinkled with some fabulously executed fight sequences. While obviously you should take the internet’s opinion that this is without doubt the greatest action movie of all time!!!1 with a grain of salt large enough to safely guarantee a steady supply of margaritas well into the next century, I cannot tell a lie, there are a handful of scenes here which are genuinely impressive. Firth, with the generous assistance of a lot of computers, manages to seem wonderfully athletic and graceful as he dances his way through inflicting bodily harm on people using his gentlemanly umbrella as a club, sling, and sword. The action itself is splendidly shot, often in show-offy long “takes” (composed of short takes grafted together with computers, but it looks cool) which depict with loving clarity the gleeful mayhem our heroes are inflicting. There is one scene in particular -- a delirious symphony of ultra-violence set to “Freebird” for no discernable reason other than their spiritual kinship in wild excess, dazzling technical proficiency, and brainless overkill-- which surely has to rank among the most impressive action spectacles of 2014. These moments of inarguable brilliance are somewhat few and far-between --other action sequences are professional but disposable, particularly the laboriously protracted but instantly forgettable climax-- but it would be unconscionable to ignore the nearly peerless strength of Vaughn’s best material here.

Alas, it is his very strengths as a filmmaker that undermine him here. Vaughn has a tremendous talent at creating well-paced, energetic, and entertaining pop entertainment, but here he never quite allows us to be seduced by the world he’s set up. For all the money at his disposal, all his great cast, all his obvious effort to craft a well-structured hero’s journey,* Vaughn keeps insisting throughout the entire film that we shouldn’t bother to take any of this seriously, that the heart of what he’s trying to do is not really to tell a story but to provide structure for a not-especially-pointed parody of the action-spy genre. Every time you start to actually care about the story  -- and you will, because Vaughn’s a terrific scene builder and working with a raft of wonderful actors -- it seems like he can’t wait to ruin it with some dumb hacky reference to another movie which just pulls you right back out again. Just as he did in KICK-ASS, Vaughn seems to think that just adding blood is the same as subverting our expectations, or commenting on the genre -- and he wants us to be never less than fully aware that this is his intention. So every single fucking beat in the movie is accompanied by some stupid postmodern quip meant to remind you how much more self-aware this movie is than the very movies from which it takes all of its best parts.

This is what happens when an Englishman misses tea time.

But just being “self-aware” is not the same thing as actually having anything to say. For a movie that keeps insisting it’s a cheeky parody, it’s just not very funny. The jokes are lazy and sophomoric, and most of its references are so punishingly generic they’d barely stand up as satire in a late-season SNL sketch, let alone a film which obvious thinks it’s being hip and subversive. Jackson’s villain character makes a big joke about how he’s not going to reveal his plan because “it’s not that kind of movie.” Nevermind that this exact postmodern joke is almost as old as that trope it’s mocking, when was the last time you actually even saw a movie do that? Fundamentally, KINGSMAN’s toothless pokes at dusty cliches are not really any more substantial than the dire reference-fest oeuvre of the infamous Freidberg/Seltzer movies, a comparison so toxic that it may well invoke Godwin’s law. Even the basic structure here belies the idea that the authors had any real understanding of the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the genre they’re trying to comment on-- how many genre-defining spy thrillers can you think of that are set up as a Campbellian Hero’s Journey? Virtually none. Hence, the parody can hardly be anything but superficial. And superficially, the Bond movies are basically already parodies of themselves. Is there anything more desperately lame than a over-the-top parody of something which was already a deadpan comedy?

So it’s a long movie which consistently seeks to remind us it’s not really about the plot, but then fails to offer any workable alternative theory about what it is about. By default, then, it ends up being about nothing at all, purely an exercise in sound and fury, signifying nothing, not even the most modest aspiration of callow wish-fulfillment fantasy. Even a solidly conservative hit piece would be preferable; I might not like it, but at least it would be something. Here, the prickly traces of angry conservatism sprinkled throughout the plot don’t add up to any kind of meaningful commentary or worldview. Just like the lazily generic Bond references, they sit there stillborn, sputtering in a stew of underbaked ingredients, drowning under the slow pull of a black hole of intention. Just because they’re there doesn’t give them meaning. And no one else ever tries.

See, this looks good but it should be a lot more awesome than it is in context.

Simply being a meaningless, superficial postmodern joke isn’t death for a movie like this. Being an unfunny one is a little more of a problem, but still not enough to sink the whole operation. There’s lots to like here; I mean, thanks to Vaughn’s sharp direction and cast, there’s nearly always something entertaining happening on-screen. But it does seem like kind of a shame that so much talent has gone into something so disposable here. I’m not asking for Shakespeare, but would it have been so untenably unhip to even pretend the movie cares about the plot, considering it takes up so much runtime? This seems like a lot of effort to go through to tell a story, only to keep assuring us it isn’t important and we shouldn’t care. I mean, it actually is a solid action movie when it sets its mind to it -- so why not just actually be an action movie? Why deflect from the one thing it genuinely does well with a much of broad meta winking at the camera? It actually feels kinda insecure to try and have it both ways, like your annoying friend who has to add an uncomfortable “just kidding!” after everything he says if it doesn’t seem to be going over well. But that just immediately deflates any possibility of either the comedy or the drama ever having much punch. The fabled Anal Sex Joke that got everyone so angried up is a classic example. I get that it’s an attempt to subvert the classic Bond double-entendres by instead going the opposite route into artless vulgarity. But what is it doing there, right in the middle of the climax, as things are supposed to be getting exciting? It’s so blatantly referential and so broadly comic that it’s impossible to get too invested in the sequence which follows it -- which happens to be the climax! With this, they exchange any possibility of an exciting, thrilling action sequence for --at best-- a mild chuckle at how rude they’re being. Not a very good trade.

The Verdict:

Well, considering I thought there was a good chance I would out-and-out hate this one, I guess being moderately but legitimately entertained by it is a pretty positive outcome. It’s surely more evidence that Vaughn is a genuine talent, and that in particular his ability to direct strong action sequences has only improved with age. Still, I can’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment that despite all the tools available to him, Vaughn decided to make something so lazy and disposable. He’s still disappointingly hung up on the rather dull idea that simply adding more explicit button-pushing content to tired old genre hokum is A) hilarious or B) subversive. I guess it’s working out for him because these movies have been big hits, but it’s a shame to see an artist with such unusual deftness for the kinetic possibilities of cinema making such uninteresting and uninvolving movies. Here’s hoping this success gives him the confidence to try something with a little more meat. I mean, it doesn’t have to be philosophical or tasteful (perish the thought!); I’d settle for a movie which can simply stand on its own two feet without having to define itself via what it’s not. Once Vaughn figures that one out, I think he may really have something.

*Even if that just meant in this case lifting the entire plot wholesale from MEN IN BLACK, at least that’s a fine source to steal from.

Mary Poppins could do this too, she just chose not to.